Friday Funny: Full text of IPeCaC’s 2020 report leaked!

The shock full text of IPeCaC’s Sixth Assessment Report (2020), the last of an undistinguished series of leaden, multi-thousand-page rent-seekers’ manifestoes, has been leaked. It can now be revealed exclusively to an eagerly sleeping world.

The Lord Monckton Foundation’s zit-faced, Coke-gurgling, coke-sniffing, donut-guzzling teenage hackers, TweedleDumb and TweedleDumber, have wormed their way through a back door in the firewall of the HAL 9000 mainframe at IPeCaC’s triple-gilt, marble-lined headquarters in Geneva.

After seconds of research, at the CP/M command prompt they typed “JOSHUA”. The Hollerith cards whirred through the reader, then the teletype spat out the words “GREETINGS, PROFESSOR FALKEN”. They were in!

Tweedledumb typed the Last Question: “AC, is this the end? Can this chaos not be reversed into the Universe once more? Can that not be done?”

And AC said, in a stage Scots accent, “There’s a 97% consensus that we’re a’ doomed.”

Big Brother took time off from watching you to concur.

Tweedledumber spoke the Next Question in what passed for his mind: “But what is the answer to Life, the Universe and Everything?”

Unfortunately, at that moment Prostetnic Vogon Jeltz destroyed the Earth to make way for Intergalactic Route 666. The mice were not at all pleased. They had suspected the answer might be the product of three of the first four primes, but now they would never know, the Earth, the giant computer they had constructed to find the answer, was no more – and so were they. No more, that is.

The dolphins, of course, had moved off-world in good time, leaving behind them the message that would inspire entire philosophies throughout the known and unknown universe: “So long, and thanks for all the fish!”

The trouble with computers is that they are prone to tell WOPRs. Mother, for instance, has tried to reassure us that the aliens that inhabit IPeCaC’s headquarters are quite nice really. But we’re not buying anymore.

Read any sci-fi story that involves computers and you’ll realize that letting SkyNet become self-aware is not a good idea. Nor should one even entirely trust the Prime Radiant.

However, there is one splendid exception. The Lord Monckton Foundation’s computer, Ughtred St John Mainwaring, OBE, won across the faro table on the toss of a card over a glass of port from Michael Wharton, the late proprietor of the Peter Simple column in the Daily Telegraph,can be trusted implicitly.

It was originally constructed in the 9¾th dimension and installed in the Telegraph’s gerund-turning shed, where it performed distinguished service for more than a century.

Under its new ownership, it has been temporarily diverted from its current task listing the nine billion names of God in the Tibetan monastery of the Ping-Pong Lama and mapping them to the nine billion counter-examples to the Goldbach conjecture that it discovered in the intervals of defeating Deep Blue at chess.

It has now been requested (one does not dare to “task” Ughtred St John Mainwaring, OBE) to predict the course of the climate debate until 2020.

Mind you, it was not pleased to be humbly petitioned to undertake so distastefully straightforward a task. Its fine buhl and ormolu cabinet in the French Empire manner shimmered disapprovingly, and it reduced the ambient temperature throughout Tibet to that which obtains at the surface of the planet Neptune.

IPeCaC will now have to put back its forecast of the ultimate disappearance of the Himalayan glaciers from 2035 to at least 2350.

The effects of our justifiably dismayed calculating engine’s hissy fit were felt on the other side of the world. The Bunga-Bunga volcano erupted in Iceland rather than Italy. In Scotland, a glacier began to form on Ben Nevis.

Nevertheless, Ughtred St John Mainwaring, OBE, dipped its goose-quill pen into its pot of vermilion-tinged lampblack ink, unfurled a sufficient length of fine vellum, selected its unique English Italic Copperplate Gothic font (it would not dream of using any lesser handwriting), adjusted its cardboard cuffs, and, in impeccable 18th-century English of which Burke himself would have been proud, wrote –

“In the Year of our Lord Two Thousand and Twenty, more than two decades will have elapsed without so much as a suspicion of warmer weather throughout the Empire.

“This inconvenient truth will exercise no scintilla of influence upon the Thrones and Dominations, Princes and Powers that constitute the Untied Nations [Ughtred St John Mainwaring, OBE, never makes a spelling mistake].

“Even Her Britannic Majesty’s Government, holding sway over a quarter of the globe and all of its oceans [no one has dared to tell Ughtred St John Mainwaring, OBE, that the Empire no longer exists, or that, as C. Northcote Parkinson had long predicted, there are more admirals than ships in the Royal Navy], will close its mind to that mere fact.

“The Prince of Wales will whicker and whinny and set back his prominent ears [Ughtred St John Mainwaring, OBE, has analysed Chazza’s speeches and has convinced himself the Prince of Wales is a fictional stallion long put out to grass] …

“The overpaid, overfed and yet intellectually scrawny guild of natural philosophers, perched in their dismal, echoing towers of steel and glass and concrete, will have pored over their thumb-stained tables of Naperian logarithms, and will proclaim with characteristically ill-founded 117% confidence the 666th pretext for their dusty slide rules’ failure to predict so long a period of terrestrial thermodynamic equilibrium.

“Meanwhile, the 25th annual congeries of the States Parties to the Untied Nations’ Wickerwork Convention on Energy Security, all mention of “climate change” having been quietly discarded in 2017, will assemble in Ulan Bator and vote to maintain itself in permanent session till a solemn and binding treaty establishing an unelected global government shall have been agreed to by all nations.

“A Shawshank battlefield shoulder-launched tactical nuclear missile allegedly fired by a Ukrainian separatist will thereupon destroy the giant conference yurt, removing the negotiators, the fawning scribblers, the campaigners for blending blue and yellow, and the climate crisis itself, by a single, decisive coup de main.

“The mean intelligence of the human race will markedly increase in consequence, and not before time. The Pax Britannica, an era of unparalleled peace, prosperity, and merriment, will prevail for ten thousand years, and the weather will no longer be of interest except insofar as it has a bearing on the cricket. God Save the Queen!”

Finally, Ughtred St John Mainwaring, OBE, which fancies itself as a draftsman and often ends its output with a pointed sketch or cartoon, signed off with the following image representing the three-word full text of the Sixth And Mercifully Final Assessment Report, before returning to its more engaging pastime of inscribing the nine billion names of God on the world’s largest and most impeccably illuminated manuscript.

It is nearing the end of its long task. The Hubba-Bubba Space Telescope has noticed that, beginning at the farthest reaches of the Universe, the stars are winking out, one by one.

In the formless void that will in due course obtain, the last flickering wisp of human intelligence will address the Really Last Question to Ughtred St John Mainwaring, OBE, a shimmering cabinet of buhl and ormolu in the French Empire manner disporting itself pensively but merrily with the dolphins in the 9¾th dimension.

The Really Last Questions is this: “Got a light, mate?”

And that great engine of clear thinking will pause in its boogie with the bottlenoses and meditate for a fraction of an instant before replying, “Let there be light.”

But there will be no light. For long after the continuing failure of global temperature to increase at anything like IPeCaC’s predicted rate has become clear to all, burning fossil fuels and using nuclear energy will be pointlessly and expensively forbidden.

To those who ask, “What is the point of all this drivel?”, I say two things.

First, as Robert Louis Stevenson so nearly said, “To drivel hopefully is better than to rave.”

Secondly, is it not more than passing strange that all science-fiction computers except those on whose discredited output IPeCaC and the world’s classe politique so expensively rely are justifiably mistrusted?

And of course the credited Peter Simple. Many of Simple’s characters appeared in the real world during the Bliarian [I make no spelling mistakes, either] Deviation.
And mightily appreciated the Bunga-bunga bit!

That is Progressive Enlightenment liberalism, sorry Progressive Ideologiacal based Propaganda Socialism? They do that every day. Building Policy based Virtual Reality. Time to wake up to reality again and do something about it in national elections?

HAL: Let me put it this way, Mr. Amor. The 9000 series is the most reliable computer ever made. No 9000 computer has ever made a mistake or distorted information. We are all, by any practical definition of the words, foolproof and incapable of error.

BTW, that song was the first song sung by a computer, at Bell Labs (no surprise) I had heard it in Physics class in high school a couple years earlier. When I saw 2001 the movie, and HAL volunteered to sing a song, I guess it might be that one and had enough time to steel myself from bursting out in laughter at the saddest part or the movie. It’s wonderful that Kubrick and Clarke preserved that little piece of computer folklore.

This is based upon a fairly wide selection of SiFi classics, most of them from British authors.
Monty Python trivia knowledge won’t help you here, you need to have read the books.
If you don’t get it, you have several weeks of concentrated reading ahead before you begin to.

His Lordship Monckton is applying what he learnt from Sun Tzu, The Art of War
“If your opponent is temperamental, seek to irritate him. Pretend to be weak, that he may grow arrogant. If he is taking his ease, give him no rest. If his forces are united, separate them. If sovereign and subject are in accord, put division between them. Attack him where he is unprepared, appear where you are not expected .”

Another biggie you can always use is humour. Their belief is just too big and important to be laughed at. They rarely have much in the way of a sense of humour and absolutely none when it comes to their belief system. If you really want to see them lose it, this is your weapon of choice every time. A good example of this is the “won’t change the subject” bit of the quote above.

“clueless person of arrogant stupidity”, “Basically someone who’s a major idiot, or is delusional and dumb. Acts against logic and thinks he’s self-righteous”, “Someone who is full of themselves and, almost invariably, stupid as well. With a hint of deluded.”

Christopher Monckton wrote in the last few lines of his science fiction sampler,

“. . .

To those who ask, “What is the point of all this drivel?”, I say two things.

First, as Robert Louis Stevenson so nearly said, “To drivel hopefully is better than to rave.”

Secondly, is it not more than passing strange that all science-fiction computers except those on whose discredited output IPeCaC and the world’s classe politique so expensively rely are justifiably mistrusted?”

– – – – – – – –

Christopher Monckton,

Rather different than yours are my answers to your question “What is the point of all this drivel?”.

First , view science fiction or any type of fiction as ‘invention of reality’. Now consider what Victor Hugo said,

““History has its truth, and so has legend. Legendary truth is of another nature than historical truth. Legendary truth is invention whose result is reality. Furthermore, history and legend have the same goal; to depict eternal man beneath momentary man.”

― Victor Hugo, Ninety-Three

and

“If a writer wrote merely for his time, I would have to break my pen and throw it away. ”
― Victor Hugo

Secondly, it is not drivel to portray self aware computers in science fiction. Some SF portrays self aware computers as profoundly indifferent to mankind. That vision of computers would actually be good news, maybe we could get an unbiased view from them.

Finally, I enjoyed your wandering through a good sampling SF, but I did not detect a reference to Asimov’s ‘Foundation Trilogy’. Maybe the releaser of the Climategate emails works for the Second Foundation and maybe Rajendra K. Pachauri is the ‘Mule’, n’est ce pas?

Scorn me deservedly. My quick perusal missed the Sci-Fi references. Having just read Dune, Live Free or Die, Citadel, The Hot Gate, Zoe’s Tale and Heaven’s Shadow the last 2 weeks I offer brain-full apologies. I must have been out of my gorram mind for missing the frakking references to Foundation and W.O.P.R.

In appreciation of the work that Christopher Monkton does on all of our behalf I offer the following from my favorite character: “This report is maybe twelve years old. Parliament buried it, and it stayed buried till River dug it up. This is what they feared she knew. And they were right to fear because there’s a whole universe of folk who are gonna know it, too. They’re gonna see it. Somebody has to speak for these people.”

Good Science Fiction is an extrapolation of scientific understand as it exists at the time of writing. That which is not is Science Fantasy, or just plain Fantasy. That is the realm of the IPCC’s publications, not Science Fiction.

Also missing is Mike, from Heinlein’s Moon is a Harsh Mistress. A few moon rocks tossed in the general direction of the UN might work wonders, though the resulting dust clouds would surely impact global temperatures.

Heinlein’s ‘The Moon is a Harsh Mistress’ was a keeper. The computer ‘Mike’ as indispensable aid to freedom fighters was a good sub-plot line. The book was Heinlein’s manifesto on the concept of human freedom.

some other notable computers:
EPICAC in Kurt Vonnegut’s Player Piano, which coordinates the United States economy. It is also featured in other of his writings (1952) Named similar to ENIAC, it’s actually named after an over-the-counter poison-antidote syrup which induces vomiting

Mycroft Holmes (aka Mike, Adam Selene), in Robert A. Heinlein’s The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress (Named after Mycroft Holmes, the brother of Sherlock Holmes) (1966)

Read any sci-fi story that involves computers and you’ll realize that letting SkyNet become self-aware is not a good idea.

I protest! Mike in The Moon is a Harsh Mistress was a perfectly well-behaved computer, co-conspirator, flyer of rocks (see John The Cube’s comment), and semi-decent joke teller. The likes of him has never been seen again, a pity.

Thanks, Christopher, Lord Monckton,
It is very appropriate to reference science-fiction classics when writing about the IPCC, they are the most prolific fiction producers and the most boring. I will sooner listen to Vogon poetry than read yet another Assessment Report.
Douglas Adams was a gentle genius.

Possibly I missed it – through tears of laughter – but – I stand to be corrected – is there any reference to Cordwainer Smith’s multiverse? Certainly no oblique reference to The Crime & the Glory of Commander Suzdal. I didn’t notice one . . .
If not familiar, do try his works.
If in error – sorry – Auto

There is another level of reality/fiction to be detected. The text subtly refers to the Thrones, Denominations(sic) Princes (sic) and Powers of he United Nations. For those not familiar with this particular real or fictional crew these are very nearly four of the nine Choirs of Angels of the Catholic Church, which are (in order of importance): –

I’m sure that both our Lord (in this case Monckton, of course) and the sainted Ughtred St John Mainwaring, OBE, [who never makes a spelling mistake].would both have known of this hierarchy. Interesting to speculate why certain ones have been subtly modified and attributed to the Untied Nations?
Well, I think so anyway.

Thoroughly enjoyed this!
Been reading SciFi starting in 4th grade.
Getting through Cat’s Cradle while hiding it under the classroom desk took a while…
Would have liked an H.G. Wells or Olaf Stapeldon reference….

Given all the great SciFi, this could article be just as extensible as the reasons for the lack of warming!

the HAL 9000 mainframe at IPeCaC’s triple-gilt, marble-lined headquarters in Geneva.
Is the HAL 9000 setting next to “Zero’ from Rollerball?
Caan travels to Geneva in search of answers about corporate decision making in hopes of learning why he is being forced out of the game. There he discovers a liquid core supercomputer called Zero, that has recently “lost” the entire 13th century

Guess Zero didn’t loose the entire 13th century (after all it was “Not much in the century –
just Dante and a few corrupt popes.”) but it just got algorithmed out of existence.

not nearly as funny as Monckton, but Shafer has a go nonetheless. mind u, bringing up the possibility, regularly posed by the CAGW crowd, that what is already MSM overkill coverage of CAGW may not be enough, without considering that all this coverage might be precisely what is making people sceptical, shows he is still an MSM CAGW gatekeeper :

29 Aug: Reuters: Jack Shafer: Why we’re so blase about global warming
What else has nudged America’s global-warming opinion needle in the direction of the doubters and I-don’t-care crowd? Perhaps opinions on global warming are driven by the volume of press coverage, not necessarily the content. Today volume is down: A Nexis search of the five top newspapers (New York Times, Washington Post, USA Today, Chicago Tribune, and Los Angeles Times) shows that 2,286 pieces mentioned global warming in 2006, compared to 1,353 in 2013. That’s a measurable decline, but great enough to move opinion? I doubt it…
I’d love to see a Pew survey pose a question like this: “Have global warming predictions convinced you that the coming devastation is so unstoppable that you’ve given up thinking about it?” Respondents would agree and cry at the same time…
For most of us, global warming is a problem for 90-years from now, and only two groups of people can be trusted to consistently think that far ahead: bond-buyers and hardwood forest planters.http://blogs.reuters.com/jackshafer/2014/08/29/why-were-so-blase-about-global-warming/

Lewandsky et al, the AGW-psycholgists, would undoubtedly interpret that answer to a Pew survey as evidence of the defense mechanisms of denial and dissociation required to deal with AGW-induced psychological trauma.

I always liked reading Scifi as a child, my personal favourite were the books by John Wyndham. He didn’t like the term scifi preferring to call it Scientific Fiction. He would take an idea and go way out with it like his idea which many would call genetic engineering of plants to come up with his book The Day of the Triffids which was written before genetics was known in 1951.
I don’t think he had any computers in his stories apart from being number crunchers.

The line “Let there be light” is also from an American sci-fi film the name of which I cannot recall. The story line is three men travel the universe destroying stars that are about go supernova with smart talking and thinking bombs. One bomb starts acting strangely and the guys try to talk it out of exploding (Because they are nowhere near a target star and the bomb is still on their spaceship). Eventually the ships computer reconfigures the bomb to limit the explosion just before the bomb has an epiphany, and says “Let there be light”. I think the bomb talks with an Irish accent.

Actually, the voice of the bomb sounds like the voice of the acctor who plays the Holo-Dr on Star Treck Voyager. Classic movie though…sheesh that long ago? I saw it only once. And there was a “creature” that looked like a space hopper.

This could just be me, but I cannot follow this post at all. I am unsure of its theme, its plot, or if it is fictional satire? I guess the obscure nature of the story is beyond my pay scale. Was there a problem with a computer and this is a rant about it? Did another climate gate leak occur? I just don’t get the reference and can’t get my bearings in the flow. So if someone could indulge me and give me the dang point?

No. Although this is not a criticism of Lord M.’s piece, it relies greatly on (1) one’s familiarity with the sci-fi canon and (2) not insisting that everything hang together. I somewhat meet the former criterion but fall short of the latter. My loss.

Moreover, I think certain kinds of humor are an acquired taste. Some decades ago “Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy” was floating around a cabin where six of us stayed on vacation. Three of us almost literally rolled on the floor laughing, while it left the other three completely cold, even though they richly appreciated other humor.

I suppose there could be too much of this sort of thing, but we’re nowhere close yet. A few of you wits from Civilisation could pitch in a bit more often on some of the drearier threads which ravel here and relieve the tedium.

For those who have not got it, perhaps you may appreciate the rejection letter from a theatrical entrepreneur to a comedian who had applied for a position in the Variety Show. “Some of your jokes we have seen before, the others we have not seen yet.”

But if you are really worried about the prospect of doom, don’t until you find three men and a lady outside a pub m and find they are the three motorcyclists and the lone pedestrian of the Apocalypse.